Turn Back Time
by skybluepink
Summary: *CHAPTER 2* Something is wrong on Red Dwarf. Rimmer orders Lister to sort it out... WHY he chooses to trust an incompetent baboon like Lister with such an allegedly important task is a question he'll be asking himself in later chapters!
1. Chapter 1

Time did not seem to move in space.  
  
Perhaps it was something to do with the somewhat lacking sunrise very morning, and the noticeably absent sunset every evening. Perhaps it was the result of long and mind-numbing days spent devising new and ingenious ways to waste time.  
  
Or it could be due to the fact that three million years into deep space on a mission meant to last a puny four and a half years, every last one of the cheap battery-operated clocks positioned around Red Dwarf had gone kaput.  
  
"You're late." Rimmer glared at Lister in a manner only comparable to the way in which the Cat looked at anybody who dared to wear dungarees.  
  
"Not according to the clock in the Medi-Bay!" Lister protested, folding his arms defensively across his podgy chest. "According to that, I still had sixteen minutes and eighty-five thousand years before we were due to have this conversation."  
  
Rimmer ignored his excuse. "You're late. You have absolutely no consideration for anybody else."  
  
Lister rolled his eyes. "We'll see. Holly, what's the time?"  
  
"Do you have ANY idea what I have to do today?" Rimmer continued, his nasal whine of a voice beginning to grate on Lister's nerves, despite the fact that they had not even been in each other's company for more than three minutes. "I had to set aside my relaxation time for this."  
  
"Rimmer, your 'relaxation time'," Lister made a face and raised the pitch of his voice in the cruelest form of imitation he knew - irritation. "Your relaxation time involves ordering your shoes by thickness of their soles." He frowned. "HOLLY? THE TIME!?"  
  
"Exactly twenty four minutes past three." Holly's booming voice filled the room. "In the afternoon."  
  
"I KNOW it's the afternoon, gimboid!" Rimmer flushed angrily as Lister grinned smarmily at him. He was not late after all. "My watch is wrong. It says twenty-SIX minutes after three! Why is my watch wrong? HOLLY!"  
  
Holly's large face appeared on the video screen in Lister and Rimmers' shared quarters, looking perturbed. "How should I know?"  
  
"You're supposed to know everything!" Rimmer clenched his fists, wondering how he had let himself get into what was about to become one of those inanely obscure conversations, which would have been better left alone.  
  
"Well I don't." Holly replied, shortly, and promptly disappeared.  
  
Lister raised an eyebrow. "What's chewing his cables?"  
  
"Who cares?" Rimmer muttered, fiddling with his watch. "I called you here for a reason."  
  
"Being?"  
  
Rimmer paused dramatically before continuing. "All two hundred and twenty seven thousand clocks onboard have stopped working."  
  
Lister's eyelids drooped. "And.? Its not like we work to time."  
  
"We?" Rimmer's voice became unnaturally high. "You're right there Listy. WE don't. I, on the other hand, do. Therefore, you have to fix them."  
  
"I'm not an electrician!" Lister complained. "I can't even fix a broken chicken soup machine and I was apparently TRAINED to do that!"  
  
"Which is a good thing clocks have nothing to do with either electricity or soup dispensers." Rimmer sang, cracking his knuckles in satisfaction. "I'll see you in a few hours."  
  
"Hours?" Lister almost laughed. "There are clocks on every deck of Red Dwarf, and they're all over the place. This ship is the size of a city. You're telling me it will take HOURS?"  
  
"Hmm, you're right." Rimmer pondered, tapping his cheek with an index finger and smirking wolfishly. "Make that weeks. Toodle-pipsky," he waved. "Don't forget to write!"  
  
Lister grunted something under his breath that strongly resembled Rimmer's favourite reason for putting him on report, and stomped off down the corridor to the Drive Room to see if he could find a manual about fixing timepieces.  
  
Rimmer clapped his hands and rubbed them together contentedly. If he was lucky, Lister would die of boredom somewhere on the deck below. However, seeing as the chance of any situation evolving where the words 'Rimmer' and 'lucky' were concerned was slim-to-none, there was a plan B. Lister would get so fed up after five minutes that he would wind up in the Karaoke Bar on Floor 207, get pissed out of his brains on lager, and sing along to Kylie Mingogue's greatest hits until he passed out and woke up two weeks later with a painful craving for a Chicken Vindaloo.  
  
It had happened before, it would happen again.  
  
Either way, it left Rimmer with plenty of time to arrange his shoes in neat rows according to the thickness of their soles.  
  
Now, where were those skutters. 


	2. Chapter 2

Lister frowned as he pulled out the one and only edition of 'Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Clocks' from the manual library in the Drive Room.  
  
"Is this a joke, Hol?" He smirked. "What kind of sad excuse for a man would write a book like this?" Turning the book over and reading its spine he almost choked with laughter. "You are taking the SMEG! Holly?"  
  
"Yes Dave." Holly answered, sounded detached from the conversation.  
  
"Was there actually a man called Tim E. Piece?" Lister snorted in amusement.  
  
"Yeah." Holly scrunched up his face. "Born Titus Luton-Gatwick into a family of pilots. Wanted out of the aeronautical field, so he opened the clock shop on floor 16 and changed his name. Slightly eccentric bloke..."  
  
His slow nature taking advantage of the situation, Lister blinked. "There was never a clock shop on floor 16."  
  
"It was two doors down from the pub, Dave."  
  
"Oh." Lister nodded. That explained it. He was barely sober by the time he got to the pub; anywhere beyond the appropriately named 'Slaughter House' was uncharted territory as far as he was concerned. "What are you DOING?" Lister made a face as he noticed what Holly was doing.  
  
"Nothing." Holly continued to contort his face into as many uncomfortable- looking shapes as possible.  
  
"Nice try. What's the problem?" Lister gritted his teeth as he watched Holly smash his pixilated countenance into the restraining walls of his computer screen.  
  
"NOTH-ING." Holly looked as though he was having a seizure.  
  
Lister folded his arms and tapped his foot. "Fine, we'll do this the hard way!" Taking a deep breath he burst into what can only be described as 'song', in its broadest definition. "May-beeee, you're gonna be the one that saves meeeee..."  
  
"Maybe I'll suck the oxygen out of this room of you don't shut up. Then we'll discuss who, if anyone, is gonna save you." Holly muttered under his breath before bashing his head against the screen again, this time making a noise. "Neeurgh!"  
  
Lister opened his mouth to sing the next line, not even remotely concerned about Holly's threat. "And-"  
  
"Alright!" Holly bellowed, continuing to knock himself around the screen like a rogue ping-pong ball. "If you must know, which apparently you MUST - MY. NOSE. ITCHES." He whacked his nose into the side of the computer screen on each syllable.  
  
Lister watched in amazement as this giant entity with an IQ alleged to be 6000 darted around every screen in the Drive Room in a manner, which, quite frankly, made him feel thoroughly nauseous.  
  
Raising two fingers to his temple, he gave Holly an awkward salute, leaving the Drive Room as quickly as possible.  
  
Apparently the clocks were not the only inanimate entities on board Red Dwarf affected by three million years worth of radiation.  
  
***  
  
Blowing a thick layer of dust from the top of the book, Lister flopped onto the floor in the corridor outside of the Drive Room. Although the sounds coming from the rest of the ship were loud enough to drown out the noise of Holly bouncing around his screen, it was not quite loud enough to conceal his usage of every curse word known between here and the other six known universes.  
  
Lister cringed, and stuck his fingers in his ears, turning the book's dusty pages with his teeth.  
  
'Everything you ever wanted to know about time, but were too afraid to ask..." The book said.  
  
Lister snorted. "Afraid to ask? Only because you'd get beaten up!" He laughed again as his skim-read through chunky lumps of text, picking up only on stupid subheadings such as 'The correct way to watch a watch' and 'Party games involving clocks'.  
  
Three hours and seventeen minutes later, Lister was just reaching the last page.  
  
His brain numbed long ago by the sheer tragedy of the book's existence, he had continued to read in great depth. This strange 'interest' in what the rest of the book had to say was triggered by severe disappointment (and definite trauma) experienced after finding page three of the book bearing a large colour photograph of the author's sixty-something-or-other year old wife who was stark naked except for the horrendously undersized clock covering her overly-ample frame.  
  
A pained groan escaped Lister's throat.  
  
Having read his way through god-knows-how-many pages of utter tripe he was STILL in the dark as to how one went about fixing a clock. Although the brand and make of clocks aboard Red Dwarf were mentioned frequently in the book, there was no mention as to what to do if they conked out. Everything else you could ever desire, or not, to know was in there. HOW was it possible that the most obvious thing had been missed out?  
  
Another pained groan rose up Lister's windpipe as he read the final footnote at very end of the book. In typewritten print and on a crumpled piece of paper stapled into the spine of the book, it looked as though it had been added as an afterthought.  
  
'Warning - Fixing clocks should not be attempted by amateurs, and therefore a section on 'healing time' has been omitted from the final published edition. Should you be in possession of a broken clock or timepiece, visit TimEPieces on floor 16 (two doors down from the Slaughter House."  
  
Placing the book on the floor in a dignified manner, Lister gritted his teeth and hoisted himself up from the floor. He glared down at the thick publication, his eyes glinting madly.  
  
"ARRRRRRRRRGH!" He roared, leaping up and down onto the accumulated sheets of tree pulp, stamping madly in a manner that could only be compared to an elephant attempting Riverdance.  
  
His lips curved upwards.  
  
That felt much better. 


End file.
